


Weekend at Sprinkle's

by tfm



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Animal Death, Beau is a Disaster Lesbian, Gen, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22256836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: Jester had asked her to look after Sprinkle for an hour. It wasn't her fault the weasel had never eaten anything other than pastries in its life.Or, Sprinkle passes to the great beyond while Beau weasel-sits. She's got about forty-five minutes to make it right.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Nott, Jester Lavorre & Beauregard Lionett, hints of Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 2
Kudos: 88





	Weekend at Sprinkle's

Weekend at Sprinkle’s

Beau stared at the dead weasel.

Fucking fuck.

‘This is all your fault!’ Nott cried. ‘You shouldn’t have fed it that pocket bacon.’

‘It’s a fucking weasel! They _eat_ _meat_.’

‘Yeah, but this one’s so used to pastries that the shock of real food probably killed it.’

They both stared a little longer.

‘Fuck,’ Nott said.

_One hour earlier_

‘ _\--_ and can you believe they won’t let me take Sprinkle!’ Jester was saying. Beau was, admittedly, not paying attention. She had been engrossed in a book about...shit...She couldn’t even remember what the fucking book was about. Jester had been going on and on, and Beau, still maybe a little bit smitten, had been utterly distracted. So maybe engrossed was the wrong word.

Sensing that Jester maybe needed to talking about something, Beau closed the book. The title read “The Age of Arcanum: A Treatise”. So probably not the best thing to be reading while Jester was bemoaning...something. Something to do with Sprinkle.

‘That’s terrible,’ Beau said, sensing that that was probably what she was supposed to say.

‘I _know_. But the Traveler _really_ wanted me to go, so I can’t exactly say no, can I?’

‘Of course not,’ Beau agreed, again, sensing that she was supposed to be agreeing.

‘But it’s going to be _so_ boring. I don’t think I’ll even be able to draw dicks on anything.’ She turned on Beau. ‘Can you do something for me?’

‘Sure,’ Beau said, immediately, sensing that Jester was going to ask for Beau to accompany her. _You’ve got it fucking bad, man_ , she told herself. _She’s not even interested_. ‘Can you look after Sprinkle for me?’

There was a long pause. ‘What?’ Beau said, finally.

‘I can’t take Sprinkle,’ Jester said, once again sighing. ‘So I need someone to look after Sprinkle for me.’ She thrust a hand over her shoulder, and pulled a small furry thing from somewhere under her cloak. The weasel hissed, and Beau jerked her hand away just in time before a set of sharp white teeth clamped down on her fingers.

‘And you want me to look after him?’ Beau asked, half incredulous. ‘Jester, you remember what happened to the last animal I owned, right?’ Some nights, Beau still half expected to the hear the sound of an owl hoot, mocking her.

‘It’s like...an hour, Beau, _please_. Everyone else makes fun of him all the time.’ Beau stared at the snarling weasel. He somehow looked underfed, even though she watched Jester feed him several times a day. Whenever they stopped for food on the road, or had dinner at the inn, or munched on pocket bacon before bed, Jester would be passing a few morsels of food onto Sprinkle. Maybe there was something about the stressful life of running away from dragons, and fighting oozy demons, and diving to the bottom of the ocean that was making him lose weight.

‘Ugh, _fine_ ,’ Beau said, though she honestly wasn’t too broken up about it. There was just something about doing things for Jester that made her not too broken up about things that really should have bothered her.

Maybe  _that_ should have worried her.

‘Omigosh, thank-you so much!’ Jester pressed a kiss to Beau’s cheek, and wrapped her strong arms around Beau’s shoulders. ‘Here, let me put him around your shoulders.’

‘Jester, I—’ Before Beau could even get a word out against the idea, Jester had gripped the weasel around the midsection, and placed him (kicking and snarling) around Beau’s shoulders. Sharp, weasley claws pierced through her Expositor robes. ‘Fuck. _Fuck,_ take him off! He’s drawing blood.’

Jester pulled the weasel away, and, if Beau was honest, that hurt a hell of a lot more than the claws actually had. She could feel the blood dripping down her back. The weasel scurried away, and up into its hidey-hole in the large tree that topped the Xhorhaus. Beau got the distinct impression that it preferred being there to anywhere else in the world. Probably because it was safe from...well, everything.

‘Anyway,’ Jester said. ‘I have to go now, to this _stupid_ thing the Traveler wants me to do.’ Beau raised an eyebrow at the wording, and another eyebrow at Jester’s tone of voice. It wasn’t often that Jester called something that the Traveler asked her to do “stupid,” and there was definitely something that Jester wasn’t actually sharing.

‘You sure you don’t want company?’ Beau asked, in a voice that was supposed to be casual but sort of just made Beau sound like a pining idiot (which wasn’t all that far from the truth).

‘No,’ Jester sighed. ‘I don’t think it will take long. He wants me to go and deface some temple, but it’s on the other side of Rosohna. I should be back this afternoon.’ There was something strangely odd about that request, but Beau didn’t want to press it. More than once, she’d brought up her concerns regarding the Traveler and his motivations, but she didn’t want to push too hard, because...well, because Jester trusted in him, and Beau didn’t want to…

She didn’t even know what she didn’t want. She didn’t even know what she did want. In any case, when Jester left, she stayed up on the roof of the Xhorhaus, keeping an eye on Sprinkle. The weasel was sitting in its hole in the tree, with a look on its face that Beau would have almost called “grateful.”

It would have been easy enough to just sit there for an hour, watching, but Beau was feeling antsy. She should do  _something_ caregivery, right? Shouldn’t just sit there and watch while…while a weasel shivered to death. Fuck. Why was it shivering? It wasn’t even cold!

‘Hang on,’ Beau said. ‘Let me get you some food.’ She dug around in her pocket until she found some bacon, a little old, but still good.

‘Are you sure you should be feeding that thing bacon?’ came a voice from behind her.

Beau jumped. ‘Holy fuck, Nott, warn a bitch before you sneak up on them like that.’ She held out the strip of bacon tantalizingly. To her surprise, Sprinkle responded almost immediately. Beau vaguely wondered when the weasel had last seen protein.

The weasel scampered down from the tree, and devoured the strip of bacon. ‘You like that, huh?’ Beau said. She pulled another strip from her pocket. What was the worst that could happen?

…

Beau picked up the body (shit, the fucking  _body_ ) of Sprinkle, and wrapped it in her Expositor’s robes. Jester would be home in like...forty-five minutes. Beau had been given one job, and she’d somehow managed to fuck it up.

‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ Beau hissed, as they made their way downstairs. Her first instinct was always to leave the scene of the crime, even though she was technically taking the corpse with her.

‘Well,’ Nott reasoned, in the voice of someone who’d had to do this sort of thing before. ‘The first thing we need is a decoy.’

They made their way downstairs to the library, Beau resisting the urge to stop at every corner, just in case Jester had come home early. Knowing Jester, she was more likely to come home late because she had decided to go and deface something else. Not that Beau was judging. Some days, she kind of reveled in the chaos. This was a completely different kind of chaos.

‘Caleb, we need to borrow Frumpkin,’ Nott announced, the second they entered the library. Caleb put down his book, and stared.

‘Are you going to eat him again?’ Caleb asked, with narrowed eyes.

‘Of course not,’ Nott said, in a “how dare you assume that I would do the thing that I’ve already done twice” sort of voice. ‘We’re going to dress him up as a weasel so we can pretend that Beau didn’t accidentally murder Sprinkle.’

‘ _Nott_!’ Beau yelled. ‘What the fuck, man!’

‘Alright, alright. So we can pretend that Beau didn’t accidentally break the trust of the person she has a huge—’

Beau tackled Nott to the ground. There was a long pause. Caleb looked down at Beau lying on top of Nott, who (to Beau’s consternation) did not look remotely concerned. 

‘If you are asking me to lie to Jester, then that is not something I would like to do,’ Caleb said, finally.

‘What the fuck, man,’ Beau said, angrily. ‘You lie to us _all_ the time.’ Technically not true. He had lied a few times in the beginning, but hadn’t in a while, as far as Beau was aware. Not unless you counted his lying about not going to visit his ex-girlfriend.

Caleb seemed to consider the point. The fact that he was actually continuing the conversation instead of walking away when it didn’t go his way was probably a good sign. ‘I lie when it is necessary. Sparing Jester’s feelings is not an adequate reason.’ Okay, maybe not a good sign.

He sort of had a point, though. Beau was falling back into shitting old habits in an attempt to...In an attempt to she didn’t even know what. To maybe not have Jester hate her for the rest of her life? It wasn’t as though she hadn’t lied to Jester before to spare her feelings. “Sure Jester, it’s really not a super worrying violation of my boundaries to send a message to my dad.”

As though she could have predicted that Sprinkle would somehow be literally unable to process anything that wasn’t a bear claw. 

‘Fine,’ Beau said, aware that she was being far more petulant than the situation called for. ‘Fuck you, then.’ She stood up off of Nott’s back, and went to go and find Caduceus.

…

Caduceus stared at her, for several long minutes. Beau had never noticed until now that he hardly seemed to blink, and when he did, it was long, and slow.

Before he even spoke, Beau knew what the answer was going to be. Consequently, she barely even listened to his treaty on how the laws of nature were savage, and blah blah blah, the circle of life. Whatever.

‘Look, I will pay for the fucking diamond,’ Beau said, exasperated, and fully aware that that wasn’t the point of the denial. She liked Caduceus well enough, but he had an annoying habit of being so fucking smug, without even trying. Like “this will be a good lesson for you” or something equally condescending.

All she needed was for him to conduct an expensive, time consuming and spiritually significant ritual on a dead weasel. It wasn’t like she was asking for the world or anything.

He gave one of those frustrating smiles, and put a hand on her shoulder, and said, ‘It’s going to work out the way it needs to.’

And that was that.

Beau retreated to her room, glumly. Jester was due back any moment now, and all Beau had to show for the time away was a dead weasel. Fucking great.

She went looking for Fjord next. She was pretty sure there wasn’t much Fjord could do, but Beau was grasping at straws. At the very least, he might be able to think of something that they could do, or provide some more condescending advice.

‘Is everything okay?’ came a voice. Yasha. She had been sitting in the training room, of all places, playing her harp, and had clearly heard the commotion of Beau swearing her way through the house. Admittedly, Beau hadn’t even considered asking Yasha for help. Unless maybe the Stormlord could electric shock a dead weasel to life, Beau didn’t think there was anything that could be done. Still, she’d asked everyone else for help. It wouldn’t hurt to ask Yasha.

Beau unwrapped the robes in her hand, showing Yasha the dead weasel.

‘Oh no,’ Yasha said. She sounded appropriately devastated. Yasha was one of the few that had never made fun of Sprinkle, and, more to the point, had never made fun of Jester for caring so much about the weasel’s fate. ‘What happened?’

‘Beau kil—’ Nott started. 

Beau whacked Nott in the face with her staff.

Fjord was, as predicted, both unsympathetic, and unhelpful. ‘Don’t you think that weasel’s in a better place?’ he asked, in a world-weary sort of voice. ‘You’ve seen the way he tries to run away every time Jester tries to pet him, haven’t you? She’ll be upset, of course...’ He paused, and Beau could tell that he’d been about to add, “but she’ll get over it.”

Thirty feet behind her, Beau heard the sound of the front door opening.  Her heart sank.

This was it. Jester was going to be devastated. Beau would have to move out of their bedroom, and into...into the fun room, or the war room, or whatever other room was empty. She wiped away the slightest tear.

‘I’m _hoooome_ ,’ Jester called out. ‘Sprinkle, have you been good for Beau?’ Beau clenched her fist.

Nott looked over at her, watching as she took Sprinkle in her hands. Ready to face the music.

‘I’ve got...one last thing I can do,’ Nott said. She waved her hand around slightly, and there was a slight shimmer in the air. From all the times she had snuck into Caleb’s room and read his spellbook (she wasn’t even going to touch the other one) Beau recognized the spell as _Phantasmal Force_.

That bought them...a minute.

Beau handed Sprinkle over to Jester, her heart pounding fast.

_Shit_ .

Shit. Motherfucking shit.

Really, they would have been better off  _not_ casting the spell. This way, Jester was going to know (in about thirty seconds) that—

Beau stared. Before her very eyes, Sprinkle hissed under Jester’s touch, and scampered around to the back of the tiefling’s neck, to where he was safe.

‘I—’ she started to say, completely and utterly confused by this change of events. Sprinkle was...alive again? And no-one had cast a spell? From what Beau could tell, Jester hadn’t even noticed that her beloved weasel had been as stiff as a board in her grip, in spite the look of utter horror on Beau’s face.

‘Is everything okay?’ Jester asked, frowning as she looked at Beau.

‘Yeah,’ Beau said, in a strained voice. She shot a look towards Nott, who seemed equally as perplexed. ‘Fine. I—did you have fun defacing the temple?’

‘Oh, it was _great!_ ’ Jester said, and went into an immediate spiel on how she had drawn so many dicks, and had almost gotten caught by so many guards. It was like nothing had happened. From Jester’s perspective, nothing _had_ happened.

Whatever the fuck god was on Beau’s side, well...she’d have to buy them a fucking drink.

…

Jester stared mournfully at Sprinkle, scratching his belly. He rolled around, clearly enjoying the attention. Well, he wasn’t hissing, at least.

I still don’t know why you wanted me to trick them like that,’ Jester said, seemingly to no-one. It wasn’t long, though, before a ghostly figure in a green cloak appeared at the other end of the bed, sitting cross-legged. ‘They looked really upset. I didn’t even think Beau liked Sprinkle that much.’

‘I don’t think it was Sprinkle that she was worried about,’ the Traveler said. There was a small smile on his face.

Jester had no idea what _that_ mean. The Traveler had told her she should do it, that it would sow chaos in amongst the group, but it also seemed kind of...well, mean.

Kind of funny though, Jester decided, after Nott described all the things that Beau had gone through in order to try and get Sprinkle back (and to keep Jester from finding out).

Nott  _really_ couldn’t keep a secret.

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, Jester casts "Feign Death" on Sprinkle using her duplicate while Beau and Nott are otherwise distracted, but really, how it happens is not the important part of the story.


End file.
